The present invention relates to a conveyor apparatus for further transporting individually supplied, flat products such as mailing pouches, printed products or work pieces, having a rotatingly driven pulling element, to which are secured spaced receiving apparatuses that can be loaded and emptied. The receiving apparatuses each have two side walls spaced in the conveying direction which form a receiving chamber that has an opening for the products.
Such apparatuses are known in the postal service as distributing conveyors for relatively flat mailing pouches which have an uneven outer shape resulting from the contents, and therefore must meet stringent requirements in mechanized processing due to the necessary reliability.
European Patent Application 0,529,301, discloses a generic apparatus in which the receiving apparatuses are containers respectively having an upper loading opening and a lower ejection opening, and are laterally secured to a pulling element. For precise and gentle ejection of the products, it is necessary to provide apparatuses below the containers, at the points of ejection, into which the products are brought into a suitable diagonal position and can be conveyed below into the prepared containers. These apparatuses must have a substantial structural height. The conveyor path is, for practical reasons, limited to an oval and a climb to an upper level is thus hardly possible.
In a known conveyor apparatus, a so-called flat sorter produced by AEG of Germany, the mailing pouches to be distributed, which have uneven or diverse outer shapes due to their contents, are leaned against a horizontally rotatingly driven wall and moved toward the individual distribution stations. From the individual distribution stations, the mailing pouches are carried away from the conveyor belt by means of a lifting element, which grips behind the mailing pouches, and are ejected into the corresponding distribution conduit. The mailing pouches are thereby displaced into an undefined position so that they cannot be further processed, for example addresses cannot be read, without additional effort.
The option of further transporting the mailing pouches by means of grippers can potentially worsen handling, because a different thickness distribution can lead to gripping problems, and/or a momentarily nondetachable adherence can result from the gripping pressure.